


The Names of the Spaces Your Heart Can't Fill

by bildungsromantic



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Post-Episode: s04e13 Journey's End
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-09
Updated: 2014-07-09
Packaged: 2018-02-08 05:14:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1927944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bildungsromantic/pseuds/bildungsromantic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What they are without the Doctor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Names of the Spaces Your Heart Can't Fill

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted in January 2009 over at Livejournal.

There are a million and one familiar things to hold on to, hot tea and the sky – the proper sky, empty of everything but blue and the pale shadows of distant stars – and Jack’s grin, his arm round her shoulders – and still Martha hesitates. Planets and holocausts behind her eyelids, the end of the world in her hands: how is she supposed to pretend like nothing has changed?  
  
  
The earth has resumed orbit, but she doesn’t know how she can.  
  
  
But she will: she does: she always has – ever since she met the Doctor and everything fell away but this wondrous, terrible universe and her ability to survive it. There is so much that Martha learned from him, but the lessons that matter are the ones she knows he never meant to teach her.  
  
  
“You know what I think’s strange?” says Mickey Smith from across the table, his eyes hard, his mouth quirked into something like a smile. They’ve all taken tea, Mickey and Jack and Martha, in a shop with sticky counters and a waitress with pink lipstick, where they’ve gone from trading stories of the Doctor – their own life stories, really, because that’s where their lives began – to sipping their drinks in silence.  
  
  
“What’s that?” Martha asks, looking away from where Jack stands, his hand to his ear as he speaks with his team, for once not bothering to hide his worry and his relief and his love. He’s called them twice already, and they’ve called once, and she knows they are all still braced against everything they almost lost. Everything they’ve already lost.  
  
  
She looks back at Mickey, who meets her gaze. “We’re the only ones who ever willingly walked away from the Doctor. We’re the only ones who could do it,” he says. He holds his cup, his expression wry. “Cheers.”  
  
  
“Cheers,” she whispers, the weight of her cup like the entire world, and it scalds her palm.  
  
  


*

  
  
“He always leaves,” says Rose’s mum with a look of disapproval.  
  
  
What she really means is that he always breaks Rose’s heart, every time, but Rose knows that this is the way it has to be. She knows that the Doctor is not hers to claim – that he belongs to the universe, to dying stars and newborn galaxies, to the future, to the past, to the TARDIS most of all. But he claimed her once, and she can’t help but think that ought to count for something.  
  
  
The Doctor is the best man she has ever met, the best and also the most selfish. He shows new, unimagined worlds to people like Rose, people who’ve seen nothing and done nothing and felt nothing in their whole life before he comes along. He gives you forever – the possibility of time and space – and it’s so easy to believe, when you’re with him, that you’re the only one who’s ever stood at his side and the only one who ever will. He lets you believe it, because maybe he wants to believe it too.  
  
  
Rose understands these things about the Doctor: his profound loneliness, the danger that follows him everywhere, and the unexpected, razor sharp edge of his inhumanity. She also knows how easy it is to forget all of that, when he smiles so easily and takes you by the hand.  
  
  
She loves him.  
  
  
Of  _course_  she loves him, as stupidly as everyone else loves him, and maybe even more. Her love for him once swallowed her whole, and she thought she would never give it up for anything. Part of her never will.  
  
  
But when this man – not  _the_  Doctor, but perhaps  _her_  Doctor – when he kisses her again on the sands of the windy, wolfish bay, she feels herself letting go of time and space. She doesn’t need forever. Instead, she holds on to this moment, right now.  
  
  


*

  
  
Bit by bit, Donna has begun to dream.  
  
  
She doesn’t notice at first – that her voice carries on its breath things that she hasn’t felt in years: curiosity, a sense of possibility; that when she slows down as she passes the airport, it’s not to watch for single, wealthy men, but to see the airplanes ascend into the fog. This morning, as she sits with her family at the breakfast table, talking around a piece of blackened toast, she doesn’t notice that she sounds like a woman with hope.  
  
  
She doesn’t notice, but her mother does. “Donna,” she begins, and she’s smiling. Lately, she’s been prone to saying sudden, unexpected things like “I love you” and “I’m proud of you,” like “You have so much to offer,” but all she says now is “You’re happy.”  
  
  
There are no reasons for Donna to agree. She’s still single and unemployed, sitting on the wrong side of thirty. She has no prospects and little money, not much to suggest any cause for future happiness, let alone a reason for present joy.  
  
  
But she can’t bring herself to say that her mother’s wrong. Something’s different, and her heart realizes at last that things are changing.  
  
  
That night, she asks her grandfather if she can come with him to stargaze. He gives her a strange look and a soft smile, but says, “Not tonight.” So through the window of her bedroom, she watches the stars and she wonders.


End file.
